Isn't this something that an Alicebot could be taught to deal with? If the current alicebot could be taught through the Admin web interface, I'd be dumping answers to common user queries in it right now so that when people mail our helpdesk it would give recommended possible answers along with assigning a ticket number and letting them know that someone will get back to them within 15 minutes. As it stands right now, the thing really doesn't remember anything but my name, so making it useful isn't a choice right now. All the programmings seems to have to come in as pre-made AIML files, which is not the intended interface, but the result of learning and reductionism.
This is the wave of the future, though. Using these limited expert/knowledgebase/intelligent systems to take care of the menial knowledge while letting us concentrate on the real fires will let us produce more. Until we have to debug the bot and explain to the CEO why it told him to "F off" after mailing in his 10th Microsoft Office question of the week.
The bot learned to get sick of you quickly and burned out. We'll have to clean out all the AIML files and start over now.
You've made the assumption that all of the third world is represented by Sally Struthers' late night commercials. There are parts of the third world that are ready to advance along with the rest of us and they resent being depicted as all looking up in hope of the next US food airdrop. Sure they need to feed their people, but at the same time you can't stifle their ambition to advance their technological capability, because in turn that goes back to helping those starving people in some way. Whether it is better agricultural science, or analysis of conditions in villages, or a census, they serve a purpose. Even the email gives them a voice outside of their nation so that they can possibly learn about how they might improve a small bit of their condition.
Now that is making some real use out of a computer, not vegetating while playing MP3s and surfing the web.
Because of power demands, I would imagine that they would try to consolidate as many 24x7 services onto as few systems as possible so that you would not have so many cases where you would need to pull power constantly. This is obviously not meant to be used for anything more than the most desperate of moments in one's computing addiction: if you do a demonstration for a village, it has to be short and you shut it off quickly after to recharge over the rest of the day in order to keep from using those 8.5W to maximize charge time. Hopefully they'll be responsible folks and set up some proper power management on these systems. In fact, we might see the next waves of ultra-low power systems coming from Africa and developing countries, so look there for experts in saving a couple of amps and making hardware work under tight conditions. Not too far from what satellite engineers do when they design systems for use in space.
Something needing to be on all the time would probably just need a few more panels ganged together in order to charge more batteries to last through the night. If this is small enough, you could also permanently mount it in the back of a small pickup with a cap on it to use as a roving communications lab. I wonder what the cheapest, lowest power communications technology available for this is that will allow it to roam and still transfer emails in a developing country, even if it is only 2400 baud. Also remember that the target audience of developing countries does not have the same perspective of a small increase in price that we do, so increasing the size of the solar panel and the battery might just take it out of the hands of a lot of people.
NOT posted as a troll, but merely some info I found. If you had any intelligence you might try educating someone if they are on the wrong some of some bad information instead of hiding behind an AC tag while trying to display how amazingly funny you've become this morning.
I think you quoted that much the same way I quoted mine above, so if you really believe that the posts on/. show how easy computers have made it for stupid people, you've provided no more leverage for your argument than if you had said you had good word that Hitler was in touch with Church officials from the moon.
Now, if you had been smart, you'd have pasted a link in there as supporting information in order to counter my statement, but all I have is your word, and frankly that just doesn't win arguments. I'm genuinely interested in this, so please provide a link where I can read up on this.
I certainly don't deny that some barbaric stuff has been done in the name of religion, but it doesn't excuse anyone else doing it.
"Free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people who's leaders at last lose their grip on information will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." - Unknown
Though Adolph Hitler was baptized Catholic as an infant, he did not practice the Faith later in life. In fact, he completely rejected Christianity as an adult, since he thought it was a "weak" religion because of its emphasis on peace and forgiveness. Instead, Hitler favored a militaristic and racist mishmash of neo-paganism and occultism, which he considered more suitable for the so-called "Aryan supermen" whom he thought would take over the world.
Here are some quotes which show what Hitler thought of Christianity:
"Christianity is an invention of sick brains," -- Adolf Hitler, 13 December 1941.
"So it's not opportune to hurl ourselves now into a struggle with the Churches. The best thing is to let Christianity die a natural death," -- Adolf Hitler, 14 October 1941.
Definitely not the words of a good Catholic! Sounds like you've heard one fact and filled in the rest yourself.
In no way does "lots of politicians" mean all of them, an actual representation of what Americans want, or even a voting majority. If the few dopes you're talking about couldn't have done it by now after all the crazed school shootings of the past couple of years, it's not going to happen.
You've apparently the statements of a few people and taken it to heart that it's the will of many more. Don't feel bad, that happens when you're an ignorant moron. Try thinking a little harder next time instead of repeating everything you're heard other people say and you'll be fine in no time.
Exactly. What happens once they run out of the little soaps and shampoos. The $40mil someone paid to get up there is going to piss them off even more for that poor service. How long will it take them to get another shipment in?
To be perfectly serious, when you go into a hotel these days, they have a sign in the bathroom asking you to conserve water. Well, guess what? They're going to need a really big supply to conserve in the first place if they want to even get started. A whole lot of people are going to have to do a whole lot of peeing after holding their bladder from the ride up from earth in order to start up that water supply and someone better have a good sewage system in place to filter that. Without water this will remain a bad 3D render.
We think that life on the ISS might be great, but think about being up there for months with...
The guy that farts all the time.
The one guy that hums only from the soundtrack to Aladdin. All. Day. Long.
The guy whose nose whistles.
The guy who has nightmare fits while he sleeps during the shift you're trying to work in.
The guy who never pees completely in the tube.
The guy who always races down the module with arms extended ahead of him like Superman, rudely bumping everyone else out of the way.
The one who always looks out the port window and yells "Aww gawd! NO! what is that?!? Nevermind."
The one who thinks no one is watching when he masturbates in the dining module.
The guy making rude racial comments every time they pass over the same part of the globe...dozens of times a day.
The guy who mumbles "something something gotta end it something something" while floating near the airlocks.
The guy who never thinks that it gets old to watch Jell-O float out of the pack into his mouth...and misses.
Trying to tell ground controllers what you really think and then realising that school kids across the country might be watching NASA TV.
The other two guys think you can't understand their language and constantly insult you in it.
And, of course, having the guy from the opposite cold-war nationality constantly throwing stares at you.
That might just suck, but the view has got to be killer.
Just like some of us systems administrators are now the janitors of the Internet and other networks, so will astronauts become the janitors of satellites and other space objects, going around playing with hoses like DeNiro in Brazil. Some might be the real workers of space, in labs to create new drugs and new "perfect" objects in the weightlessness of space, but most will just be support people there to clean the tanks, burn the trash, prepare the foods, and ferry people up and down. But, boy, will that view be great to see.
What can we geeks do to help the space program? Why, we can be geeky and talk it up to people that normally don't think about space. NASA just isn't hyping space up like they used to, and even though you're supposed to see the ISS as a bright object in the sky, people forget because that's about the time they'e running home from work and have bigger things on their minds. It's up to us to bring it up...the ISS isn't going to talk itself up at the water cooler. If people don't know that anything important is going on up on that station or anywhere else in space, then citizens are going to go for those budget cuts and NASA will go nowhere. Let's not repeat the post-Apollo-pre-shuttle days by sitting on the side and watching it go by. Will the next few Mars rovers be the spectacle of the first, or will people treat it as a bad sequel and groan? Or will people just hear about another accident in space on the way to Mars and roll their eyes?
Without something life-changing happening in space, I'm afraid those people across the world (the I in ISS, folks!) will forget about space if we don't remind them. With the Middle East on the verge of causing World War III and such other perils, people honestly don't have time to think about this until something like an explosion or astronauts sodomizing each other makes a newsbite.
I happen to subscribe to the Space.com newsletters, and without them, I would not have remembered that the shuttle Atlantis took off today to the ISS to attach the Joint Airlock module. Who else knew what the astronauts on the ISS did yesterday?
After the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy collision posting and the article about the Sun going red giant, I'm getting the idea that these Solar races should be held more often than yearly. With only a few billion years left, we are now running out of Solar vehicle races.
It sounds like in five billion years the sun will do no such thing. After the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, there won't be anything left but rapidly nova'ing stars and vast stretches of burning gases. Something radically other than human will be here to witness that weird night sky.
This is only matched by the number of people who blindly cheer at every single piece of cinema put to tape and declare the director as brilliant and a genius. I haven't seen a piece of film that I consider genius quality in a long time, so I'm guessing the average person in the world is now either blind, has received a major head trauma, or was born that way. Of course, 15% of those ended up being invented by Fox to market their movies or paid to make testimonials, but there are still enough of them that can make a bad movie sell like a cure for cancer.
Having seen the Lynch Dune way back when it first came out for VCRs, then having read the books and finally seen this one after waiting with bated breath, they both have parts where they stunk big time, and parts where they were great. Where is that Phantom Edit when you need it?!? Someone should glue the two together to get the best of both worlds. Frankly (no pun intended), there were parts that Lynch magically pulled out of his rectum to add to the movie - such as the weirding modules - which I cannot believe Herbert agreed to without having previously been tied up and locked in a room full of cobras. I still like the special effects of the Lynch Dune and the movie has parts that carry the suspense and action that I felt in the book. The SFC Dune had some neat scenery, pronounced Harkonnen completely wrong, had some effects that blew dead monkeys, and more importantly covered some scenes that were important in the book and which Lynch completely left out.
What will the new ones do for books that I felt carried no big suspense or action? Time to go get House Harkonnen.
The wires have to be off the floor? That explains the dirty looks my wife gives me. For my racking needs, I just picked up a wire shelf for $60 at Walmart. Nothing gets screwed in, but the thing is supposed to hold up to a ton and the equipment (routers, sparcs, PCs) sites nicely on it. I would not recommend it in earthquake prone areas without bolting it to the wall.
Anyone using this on their server is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Banner ads have enough trouble displaying and anyone rejecting IE eyeballs at their site is rejecting a large percentage of the Internet that day and insuring that advertisers won't pay full rate. No one owning a store would tell people
Non-commercial sites would probably do OK with this, but note that some people running Apache Linux servers may not be browsing with a non-MS browser and you might be pushing them away from using open stuff. Is it really that open, then?
Well, Korean is considered one of the Turk languages (Altaic?), and Turkey is *sort* of considered part of Europe. Thai is also considered to have been under Indian influence, and considering the number of Indian people involved in technology around the world, I'm surprised that at least Hindi isn't on the list. Also, I see no African languages in that list, where people are most likely to need translation for peace keeping missions.
At $10mil a film, that's a small enough part of the budget that many would be willing to go up and the module would pay for itself in 10 missions. This could lead other private sector companies to fund modules so that they can get some small benefit like a news desk in space, or the special NSA section, or a module holding a few bombs to let gravity do its thing. From the article, "We could have the first broadcast of music from space... We could have TV programming or a motion picture." seems to be unambitious since that's probably not good for more than closing a channel for the evening to the Star Spangled banner or a few more overstocked movies at the Discovery Store.
The other thing to consider is that if ISS whores themselves out to doing this, that puts the Tito mission in a whole new light. And will this turn out to be another situation where the Russians decide to launch it to the station and tell the ISS partners that they can do whatever they want? Still for filming this sort of thing, consider what is more dangerous, zigzagging a place up and down for a few hours, or a 20 minute ride on the shuttle that most people would kill for to film for a week. An actor might make the investment of visiting Star City to market themselves as an actor ready for space filming or the studio would send actors off to take space lessons much as they do for other skills they want their actors to quickly get the hang of.
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Isn't this something that an Alicebot could be taught to deal with? If the current alicebot could be taught through the Admin web interface, I'd be dumping answers to common user queries in it right now so that when people mail our helpdesk it would give recommended possible answers along with assigning a ticket number and letting them know that someone will get back to them within 15 minutes. As it stands right now, the thing really doesn't remember anything but my name, so making it useful isn't a choice right now. All the programmings seems to have to come in as pre-made AIML files, which is not the intended interface, but the result of learning and reductionism.
This is the wave of the future, though. Using these limited expert/knowledgebase/intelligent systems to take care of the menial knowledge while letting us concentrate on the real fires will let us produce more. Until we have to debug the bot and explain to the CEO why it told him to "F off" after mailing in his 10th Microsoft Office question of the week.
You've made the assumption that all of the third world is represented by Sally Struthers' late night commercials. There are parts of the third world that are ready to advance along with the rest of us and they resent being depicted as all looking up in hope of the next US food airdrop. Sure they need to feed their people, but at the same time you can't stifle their ambition to advance their technological capability, because in turn that goes back to helping those starving people in some way. Whether it is better agricultural science, or analysis of conditions in villages, or a census, they serve a purpose. Even the email gives them a voice outside of their nation so that they can possibly learn about how they might improve a small bit of their condition.
Now that is making some real use out of a computer, not vegetating while playing MP3s and surfing the web.
Because of power demands, I would imagine that they would try to consolidate as many 24x7 services onto as few systems as possible so that you would not have so many cases where you would need to pull power constantly. This is obviously not meant to be used for anything more than the most desperate of moments in one's computing addiction: if you do a demonstration for a village, it has to be short and you shut it off quickly after to recharge over the rest of the day in order to keep from using those 8.5W to maximize charge time. Hopefully they'll be responsible folks and set up some proper power management on these systems. In fact, we might see the next waves of ultra-low power systems coming from Africa and developing countries, so look there for experts in saving a couple of amps and making hardware work under tight conditions. Not too far from what satellite engineers do when they design systems for use in space.
Something needing to be on all the time would probably just need a few more panels ganged together in order to charge more batteries to last through the night. If this is small enough, you could also permanently mount it in the back of a small pickup with a cap on it to use as a roving communications lab. I wonder what the cheapest, lowest power communications technology available for this is that will allow it to roam and still transfer emails in a developing country, even if it is only 2400 baud. Also remember that the target audience of developing countries does not have the same perspective of a small increase in price that we do, so increasing the size of the solar panel and the battery might just take it out of the hands of a lot of people.
What kind of orbit is that exactly that it stays on the sunny side? Not geosynchronous since that follows the same global spot around.
NOT posted as a troll, but merely some info I found. If you had any intelligence you might try educating someone if they are on the wrong some of some bad information instead of hiding behind an AC tag while trying to display how amazingly funny you've become this morning.
I think you quoted that much the same way I quoted mine above, so if you really believe that the posts on /. show how easy computers have made it for stupid people, you've provided no more leverage for your argument than if you had said you had good word that Hitler was in touch with Church officials from the moon.
Now, if you had been smart, you'd have pasted a link in there as supporting information in order to counter my statement, but all I have is your word, and frankly that just doesn't win arguments. I'm genuinely interested in this, so please provide a link where I can read up on this.
I certainly don't deny that some barbaric stuff has been done in the name of religion, but it doesn't excuse anyone else doing it.
"Free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people who's leaders at last lose their grip on information will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master." - Unknown
Also used in the game Alpha Centauri attributed to
Quoted from a site on the net...
Definitely not the words of a good Catholic! Sounds like you've heard one fact and filled in the rest yourself.In no way does "lots of politicians" mean all of them, an actual representation of what Americans want, or even a voting majority. If the few dopes you're talking about couldn't have done it by now after all the crazed school shootings of the past couple of years, it's not going to happen.
You've apparently the statements of a few people and taken it to heart that it's the will of many more. Don't feel bad, that happens when you're an ignorant moron. Try thinking a little harder next time instead of repeating everything you're heard other people say and you'll be fine in no time.
As long as they use some sort of TCP based protocol to guarantee that the payload is received...
I guess that episode for Star Trek Voyager just wasn't true. I'm going to have to look back and see what else about that series might have been bogus!
Exactly. What happens once they run out of the little soaps and shampoos. The $40mil someone paid to get up there is going to piss them off even more for that poor service. How long will it take them to get another shipment in?
To be perfectly serious, when you go into a hotel these days, they have a sign in the bathroom asking you to conserve water. Well, guess what? They're going to need a really big supply to conserve in the first place if they want to even get started. A whole lot of people are going to have to do a whole lot of peeing after holding their bladder from the ride up from earth in order to start up that water supply and someone better have a good sewage system in place to filter that. Without water this will remain a bad 3D render.
We think that life on the ISS might be great, but think about being up there for months with...
The guy that farts all the time.
The one guy that hums only from the soundtrack to Aladdin. All. Day. Long.
The guy whose nose whistles.
The guy who has nightmare fits while he sleeps during the shift you're trying to work in.
The guy who never pees completely in the tube.
The guy who always races down the module with arms extended ahead of him like Superman, rudely bumping everyone else out of the way.
The one who always looks out the port window and yells "Aww gawd! NO! what is that?!? Nevermind."
The one who thinks no one is watching when he masturbates in the dining module.
The guy making rude racial comments every time they pass over the same part of the globe...dozens of times a day.
The guy who mumbles "something something gotta end it something something" while floating near the airlocks.
The guy who never thinks that it gets old to watch Jell-O float out of the pack into his mouth...and misses.
Trying to tell ground controllers what you really think and then realising that school kids across the country might be watching NASA TV.
The other two guys think you can't understand their language and constantly insult you in it.
And, of course, having the guy from the opposite cold-war nationality constantly throwing stares at you.
That might just suck, but the view has got to be killer.
Just like some of us systems administrators are now the janitors of the Internet and other networks, so will astronauts become the janitors of satellites and other space objects, going around playing with hoses like DeNiro in Brazil. Some might be the real workers of space, in labs to create new drugs and new "perfect" objects in the weightlessness of space, but most will just be support people there to clean the tanks, burn the trash, prepare the foods, and ferry people up and down. But, boy, will that view be great to see.
What can we geeks do to help the space program? Why, we can be geeky and talk it up to people that normally don't think about space. NASA just isn't hyping space up like they used to, and even though you're supposed to see the ISS as a bright object in the sky, people forget because that's about the time they'e running home from work and have bigger things on their minds. It's up to us to bring it up...the ISS isn't going to talk itself up at the water cooler. If people don't know that anything important is going on up on that station or anywhere else in space, then citizens are going to go for those budget cuts and NASA will go nowhere. Let's not repeat the post-Apollo-pre-shuttle days by sitting on the side and watching it go by. Will the next few Mars rovers be the spectacle of the first, or will people treat it as a bad sequel and groan? Or will people just hear about another accident in space on the way to Mars and roll their eyes?
Without something life-changing happening in space, I'm afraid those people across the world (the I in ISS, folks!) will forget about space if we don't remind them. With the Middle East on the verge of causing World War III and such other perils, people honestly don't have time to think about this until something like an explosion or astronauts sodomizing each other makes a newsbite.
I happen to subscribe to the Space.com newsletters, and without them, I would not have remembered that the shuttle Atlantis took off today to the ISS to attach the Joint Airlock module. Who else knew what the astronauts on the ISS did yesterday?
After the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxy collision posting and the article about the Sun going red giant, I'm getting the idea that these Solar races should be held more often than yearly. With only a few billion years left, we are now running out of Solar vehicle races.
It sounds like in five billion years the sun will do no such thing. After the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies collide, there won't be anything left but rapidly nova'ing stars and vast stretches of burning gases. Something radically other than human will be here to witness that weird night sky.
Formally, it is "The City Formerly Known As Lost", but they're having trouble coming up with one of those Prince symbols.
This is only matched by the number of people who blindly cheer at every single piece of cinema put to tape and declare the director as brilliant and a genius. I haven't seen a piece of film that I consider genius quality in a long time, so I'm guessing the average person in the world is now either blind, has received a major head trauma, or was born that way. Of course, 15% of those ended up being invented by Fox to market their movies or paid to make testimonials, but there are still enough of them that can make a bad movie sell like a cure for cancer.
Having seen the Lynch Dune way back when it first came out for VCRs, then having read the books and finally seen this one after waiting with bated breath, they both have parts where they stunk big time, and parts where they were great. Where is that Phantom Edit when you need it?!? Someone should glue the two together to get the best of both worlds. Frankly (no pun intended), there were parts that Lynch magically pulled out of his rectum to add to the movie - such as the weirding modules - which I cannot believe Herbert agreed to without having previously been tied up and locked in a room full of cobras. I still like the special effects of the Lynch Dune and the movie has parts that carry the suspense and action that I felt in the book. The SFC Dune had some neat scenery, pronounced Harkonnen completely wrong, had some effects that blew dead monkeys, and more importantly covered some scenes that were important in the book and which Lynch completely left out.
What will the new ones do for books that I felt carried no big suspense or action? Time to go get House Harkonnen.
The wires have to be off the floor? That explains the dirty looks my wife gives me. For my racking needs, I just picked up a wire shelf for $60 at Walmart. Nothing gets screwed in, but the thing is supposed to hold up to a ton and the equipment (routers, sparcs, PCs) sites nicely on it. I would not recommend it in earthquake prone areas without bolting it to the wall.
Anyone using this on their server is cutting off their nose to spite their face. Banner ads have enough trouble displaying and anyone rejecting IE eyeballs at their site is rejecting a large percentage of the Internet that day and insuring that advertisers won't pay full rate. No one owning a store would tell people
Non-commercial sites would probably do OK with this, but note that some people running Apache Linux servers may not be browsing with a non-MS browser and you might be pushing them away from using open stuff. Is it really that open, then?
Well, Korean is considered one of the Turk languages (Altaic?), and Turkey is *sort* of considered part of Europe. Thai is also considered to have been under Indian influence, and considering the number of Indian people involved in technology around the world, I'm surprised that at least Hindi isn't on the list. Also, I see no African languages in that list, where people are most likely to need translation for peace keeping missions.
At $10mil a film, that's a small enough part of the budget that many would be willing to go up and the module would pay for itself in 10 missions. This could lead other private sector companies to fund modules so that they can get some small benefit like a news desk in space, or the special NSA section, or a module holding a few bombs to let gravity do its thing. From the article, "We could have the first broadcast of music from space ... We could have TV programming or a motion picture." seems to be unambitious since that's probably not good for more than closing a channel for the evening to the Star Spangled banner or a few more overstocked movies at the Discovery Store.
The other thing to consider is that if ISS whores themselves out to doing this, that puts the Tito mission in a whole new light. And will this turn out to be another situation where the Russians decide to launch it to the station and tell the ISS partners that they can do whatever they want? Still for filming this sort of thing, consider what is more dangerous, zigzagging a place up and down for a few hours, or a 20 minute ride on the shuttle that most people would kill for to film for a week. An actor might make the investment of visiting Star City to market themselves as an actor ready for space filming or the studio would send actors off to take space lessons much as they do for other skills they want their actors to quickly get the hang of.
Before the video game in 1992, there was Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis in 1991.
If that goatse.cx picture was ever appropriate anywhere, this story would be the place. Hello consumer, open wide.